


Winter Sun

by deadseas



Series: Winter Sun [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Brainwashing, Bucky Barnes is not a Happy Bunny, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Past Abuse, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Rumlow is a nasty piece of work, Unreliable Narrator, things get worse before they get better
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2017-04-07
Packaged: 2018-09-08 15:26:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8850253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadseas/pseuds/deadseas
Summary: Bucky never stopped falling. It was the Soldier who hit the ground.





	1. Freight Car (грузовой вагон)

_Report, soldat._

When he could not, a blow followed. Sharp as the snap of a cable, a star burst, an acid splash; the Soldier relished the burn. He almost preferred it to the numbness.

_Is this really necessary?_

Pierce's reply was soft, reasonable. Even when he struck the Soldier, his voice always stayed soft.

_He is an animal and animals must be trained._

Too often, the Soldier failed to comply, questioned the mission. Such faults were symptomatic of a fatal flaw in his code.

 _He's unstable. Erratic_.

If only he could isolate the defect himself, but the Soldier was a faulty device, in frequent need of recalibration.

_Shut down. Restart._

Magnetic bands locked his limbs firmly in place. He shouldn't struggle. That way lay pain. Every way lay pain. Immobilized like this, even the Soldier felt fear. It licked his spine, lapped at the soles of his feet. The frigid tang of death filled his mouth, acrid rubber stiff between his teeth. Muscles wound tight and hackles raised, he waited for the crackle of static. His pulse hammered in his ears; his breathe came in harsh pants.

_Odin. Dva. Tri._

The machine hummed and raw electricity surged through his body. His back arched with the current. It seared, burned, forced its way in. Nerve endings crackled and popped like fireworks. His blood boiled. He was molten. He was glacial. He tried -oh God, he tried- to hold on, but he was slipping, slipping, slipping. Pierce stood by and watched him scream, endlessly, endlessly until his voice broke and he broke with it. He was their instrument, after all.

_Put him on ice._

White hot. White cold. Then nothing.

 

From the nothingness, there came pain. Barely a flicker, at first. An icy splinter lodged in his chest. With it, a question took shape. It rooted itself in the knot of his stomach where it germinated into a ripe cancer. Irrepressible growth, flowering fit to burst his lungs, until it was all he could remember.

_The man on the bridge. Who was he?_

In the end, it wouldn't matter. Whoever he was, he had to die.

 

_Please don't make me do this._

The Captain's choked-out plea, like all those that had come before it, the Soldier met with stony silence. Many of his targets had begged, pitifully. Except the Soldier had no pity. He wielded death, swift and sure. Failure to terminate was unacceptable. Bridges burned, lessons learned. What followed was a brutal dialogue of muscle torn from muscle, bone from bone. Pained grunts and punctured lungs. The binding and uncoupling of sinews. Founts of blood gurgled forth: his mother tongue. Mercy was a foreign concept. The Soldier had none. Only the merciless survived an upbringing like his. He aimed. He fired. The Soldier smiled grimly as the shots hit home.

So, when the Captain spared the Soldier, it did not compute.

Blasts rent the sides of the helicarrier, causing it to lurch violently. The battlefield of hot steel and glass juddered and groaned.

Once his objective was complete, the Captain didn't even fight back. He gazed at the Soldier, as no one had truly looked at him before, with benediction and longing. Weakness. The Soldier would crush it. He would crush him.

_You're my friend._

The Soldier struck. Again. Again. Acid and smoke scraped his throat raw.

 _You're my mission_.

The Captain wheezed. The Captain bled. His opponent had yielded, so why didn't it feel like the Soldier was winning? He dealt a barrage of blows. Relentless. Frantic. The Captain's eyes were vivid in his battered face. Sky high. Blue as the fourth of July. Those eyes were like touch, like reaching, across the gulf of synapses. Snapped wires radiant ends. They snagged the Soldier like an old rope drawn from some deep pit inside. All he could do was hold the line until the thread came undone... No. No. He would not stop until those wretched eyes were swollen shut for good. He would leave nothing but pulp. He would leave nothing.

_Then, finish it._

The world was collapsing. A maelstrom roared in his ears.

_'Cause I'm with you-_

Who was this man with his mercy and stupidity? A song in his blood. Fire in his mind. An impossible truth. A whispering, shivering spark. A glitch. A broken link in the chain. Recognition. Revelation. It was as if he belonged to the Soldier, like he was his to protect.

_But I knew him._

Another bridge. Another time. Another life.

_Go! Get out of here!_

His -friend? brother?- waved him on -away, away- but this version of the Soldier resisted. He would not leave this man. The teetering scaffold of the past disintegrated before his eyes. A great rift. Drenching blistering heat. Slick palms clasped the metal railing. Melted eyes. Gritted teeth.

 _Not without you_.

He couldn't leave. He couldn't reach. It was as if he was just up there to watch.

_-till the end of the line._

The Soldier knew him. He watched him fall. Out of reach, disappearing after his shield. Gone, gone, gone. The only fight the Captain had ever backed down from. Golden boy. His to protect.

The Soldier followed.


	2. One (Один)

The body he towed from the watery wreckage was barely breathing. Dead weight. All warmth leached away. Blue lips, red wounds. Wounds the Soldier had put there. There was an unexplained tightness in his own chest. Like asthma.

His to protect.

 _Come on, now._ _Breathe_ _with_ _me._

The Captain breathed. The Soldier exhaled. Relief? Relief.

 

First rule of going on the run: don't run, walk. The Soldier walked away from the mission and kept walking.

His movements were slow and uneven, like a toddler or a very old man. It was as if he'd aged 50 years. Pain was background static. White noise, no longer separated out into distinct hurts. Every inch of him was made up of old wounds reopened. Dislocated shoulder. Dislocated self.

All it took was a slam against a concrete wall to knock it back into its socket. Reset. Refresh. Already, the frayed fibres had begun to knit back together, but he would remember the damage this time. How he'd snarled and screamed as the joint had been forced out of alignment. How he'd been capable of nothing else.

The Soldier tasted river. Iron and ashes. Bitten tongue. Failed mission. Utter, abject failure. Complete malfunction. All systems haywire. He'd left his target breathing. He'd made _sure_ to leave his target breathing. The wolves would come for him soon. Luckily, his masters had made sure that he was good at disappearing. Silhouette in the fog, intangible to begin with. There and gone. Fade to black. He ghosted away. Unresolved.

Unmoored, he wandered without purpose. Since when did the Soldier save instead of take life? It was unheard of. No single reaper had ever been accredited with so much destruction. Orchestrated crashes, untraceable shots, the allotment of innumerable deaths. For a ghost, he sure made his mark. _Casualties of freedom_ , Pierce called them. Necessary evils. Collateral afterthoughts.

 

Inexplicably, the Smithsonian was where the Soldier ended up. He'd long since shed his leathery protective skins in favour of civilian clothes. The voices of the crowd were captured by the high ceilings, the detached echoes of murmuring spirits separated from their bodies. Like him. A collection of ghost stories. Props and moving pictures. Nothing more. Memory was accessory. He didn't need it to survive, but it was... _his._ Or it should have been.

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

The words rattled around inside him like hailstones. Plain and cold and bruising. The Soldier felt gutted. Hollowed. As if he'd swallowed a blizzard raw.

He carried the body of his late self through the exhibition in silence. Despite the nondescript garb, with his shaggy hair pulled back, there was a chill to him that could not be masked. Hunched in the corners like a hulking bogeyman, he exuded a certain menace, but he also knew how to fade into the backdrop. Swells of people passed him by, oblivious. Likewise, he paid them no mind. The Soldier only had eyes for the displays.

_Bucky Barnes and Steven Rogers, inseparable on both school yard and battlefield._

The Soldier couldn't quite connect his feral self to the smiling Commando plastered everywhere the Captain was. No trace of that slow easy grin, those laughing eyes, immortalised in the archive footage. They watched each others backs those two strangers. Friends. Tethered at the hip, they pored over maps, planned raids; returned glowing from yet another successful mission. So full of themselves and of life that they could barely contain it.

To the Soldier, they were figments, dancing wild delicate rings around each other at the edges of his mind in the struggle to become separate. Flip sides of the same tarnished old coin. Two boys. One determined to build a better life, one a better world. It seemed as though they would chase each other forever. Across the world. Through the depths of hell and time. They knew not then what would be lost along the way.

_Your name is James Buchanan Barnes._

That name had long since been laid to rest, along the dotted line, lost along with his date of birth, his history. Ribbons of film unspooled, flickering behind the Soldier's eyelids. Inextricable. Twisted and tampered with, whole lengths misplaced. Reeling, reeling. He always came up short. Threads snipped by the chair.

Words swam like tadpoles. Drunken armies of print marching east. Numbly, the Soldier learned that he'd once had a family: mother, father, sisters. More leads to chase. Proof that he'd been born before he was made. The Captain, he felt like family too. More than that. Else than that. He was all Barnes had left in the world. Rogers' image was a bundle of light imprinted in his mind's eye. Summer to his own bitter, bitter winter.

_I knew him. I knew him. I knew him._

 

_James Barnes. Sergeant. 32557264._

On that table, serum burning through his bloodstream, he strung himself onto those words like beads on a rosary. Needles, electrocutions. All muddled together. Launched into the fray of soldiers taking names, he'd never imagined that he'd end up like this. Surrounded, but so completely alone. Until Steve interrupted his litany and tore away the straps.

_Bucky. Bucky Barnes.That's who you are._

The name held the Soldier hostage. His own? To keep?

Perhaps-

_No._

He was The Asset. No name. No face. No one.

An internal war waged between wanting to be nothing and wanting to be himself _,_ whatever that entailed. His head had become a twisted labyrinth he no longer knew how to navigate. Dead ends everywhere. Amputations. They'd cauterized his mind along with his mangled limb. By all accounts, Barnes was a dead man.

The Soldier was a lab creation. Fashioned from metal and blood. He would never live up to his memory.

Besides, Barnes himself was a pretender. No hero. Just the shell of one.

It was a killer who followed Captain America. Through blazing hell after blazing hell. Through the jaws of death. Through a dozen war flicks.

Ghost towns, little more than the burnt-out husks of buildings, which could erupt into volleys of gunfire at any moment. Forest clearings where mounds of the dead slept with eyes wide open. Scorched earth. Hideous waves of bruising light. Ash and fumes. Sweat and piss and cheap whiskey to take the edge away. But what had kept Bucky up at night was not the threat of impending death, but his all-consuming fear of losing the Captain. He would have taken on all the shadows in the world if he could, just to keep them away from Steve. His solemn vow. Anything keep his friend safe.

Sergeant Barnes had never been as afraid of the dark as he should have been. In fact, he had invited the the darkness in. Not a good man, but a perfect soldier. Out there, his body had become the rifle. Sighting his quarries, he'd dropped men left and right. Sacrificed sleep, body and soul.

It was a killer that stalked through the train. A killer that had lurked there all along. Exactly the raw materials Hydra happened to be looking for.

 

The mud of humanity, passed through the crucible. Enhanced with vibranium. Fired and honed by war. Alchemy. Forgery. New-minted coin stamped with Hydra's image. Toy soldier. Tin soldier. Man maketh monster. They'd slowed his heart. Lined his limbs with lead. Ferrous veins. Hair clotted with the reek of rust. He was the weapon. The weapon was him. Inescapably fused to his welded skeleton. Art of war. Artifice. Anathema. Lost, broken, damned _thing_. Not superhuman, but subhuman.

The Soldier fingered the puckered snarl of scar tissue, the scrape of metal plate. The flesh there was bumpy and stiff as leather. A wax seal where the arm was soldered in place. His shoulder ached more than ever before. He wanted to claw off his skin.

Long ago, the chill had seeped in and bleached his brain; it numbed the Soldier from the blurred accident of having lived until there was no care left in him. Only hard-wired orders and well-oiled Soviet toy-making. A collection of parts. Dismantled and reassembled too many times.

 

Bucky Barnes never stopped falling. It was the Soldier who hit the ground. He hit the ground hard. He hit the ground running. The Winter Soldier had no name. Only a mission to complete.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I listened to a lot of the SOHN album Tremors while writing this. Also Zack Hemsey.  
> 


	3. Homecoming (возвращение на родину)

After the Smithsonian the Soldier fled DC. Without a mission all there had been left to do was run. All the way to Europe. A land riddled with mines. Secrets to excavate and horrors to put to rest. Hydra wouldn't stay dead for long. Even after the remnants of SHIELD had hacked up the organisations' bloated corpse, severed limbs twitched. Decapitated heads sprouted new ones, uglier still. Simultaneously Frankenstein and his monster. This was the entity that had spawned the Soldier. Death was long overdue. For both parties.

So much had gone unavenged.

 

One year later, in Romania, James Barnes was sighted in the street, buying plums from a market stall.

 

The Soldier had gotten accustomed to laying low. Currently, he was squatting in a derelict inner-city apartment block in Bucharest. He had no neighbours. He had no visitors. So, when he heard a resounding knock at the door it felt more than a little out of place. Could be Interpol. Most likely SHIELD. Hydra would never knock first. It sounded again, louder this time. Not the aggravated rap of knuckles, but the insistent thump of the butt of a gun hitting wood. The door was flimsy. The Soldier could tear through it like a sheet of tissue paper. It certainly wouldn't withstand a battering. In the space of a heartbeat, he plunged his metal fist through the floorboards and snagged the getaway backpack he'd stashed there, sparing one last glance to the dingy Spartan room he'd called home these past few months. His own space. Not legally, of course, but it had served its purpose. Antechamber. Purgatory. The Soldier felt nothing.

“Poliţia!”

Caught between a 50ft sheer drop and a host of armed police, he saw no way out but to fight. The Soldier tossed a gravely “Bună dimineața,” in greeting as he swung the door open. The first agent, clad in black body armour and pointing a gun in his face, reached the threshold and the Soldier slammed the door, hitting her full in the face and trapping her arm, which sent her weapon clattering to the floor. The Soldier swiped it and ducked behind the grimy kitchen counter as the rest of the SWAT team open fired. Bullets peppered the walls. The Soldier returned fire. Not that he needed guns to kill. He was an arsenal in and of himself.

“Stop!”

The Soldier froze up. _That_ voice. _The_ voice. It came from behind him. Far, far, far. The memories hit like an avalanche.

 

For a moment, there was only falling. Plucked weightless, he plummeted down, down, down. Whistling. Shrieking. The wind snatched his screams away. Terror burned him up like a comet. He clawed at the nothingness. Empty, empty air. When he struck the muffled ground, it was a blessing.

At the base of some nameless mountain he opened his eyes and saw red. Blood pooled around him like a second shadow. A crimson star in the snow. The life fled his body in hot spurts. Butterflies and needles. He couldn't feel his arm. He couldn't feel a thing except biting cold. Whirling crystals. Flakes of silence. Lashing. Slicing. Nothing burned like the cold. Then voices. Half-imagined. He hoped beyond hope-

But it was the wolves that found him first. Bayed and cackled. His fear hung sharp in the air. Bloom of fresh blood. The wolves looked just like men. When they dragged him away it left a trail.

 

“Bucky!”

Motionless, the Soldier crouched there. Cornered. Quaking with primal desire -to fight, to fly- but he remained paralysed. His eyes met Rogers' across the room, like morsels of winter-blue sky. Glimmer of freedom at the bottom of a frozen-over wishing well. Only, for the Soldier, no such thing existed.

 

There were no words. Only urgency. A ceaseless loop. _Bucky, Bucky, Bucky._ Name without form. It buzzed. Incessant. The exodus of flies from a carcass. The droning whine of the saw, followed by searing, scything pain. It bit deep. To the quick. To the bone. It carved him anew.

_Stop. I'm not him. I'm not him. I'm not-_

He couldn't breathe. His limbs unlocked and he pitched forwards. Caved in. He was so far gone. Immersed. Entrenched. God knows where. Deep in the bowels of the Hydra base, where time folded in on itself and pain was puppet master. They'd turned his body against him; it became a cage. A prison of blood and bone. A weeping stump. Carrion. Partially deceased, yet still anchored to life and pain. Steve -the mission- was his sole lifeline. Shield. Shelter. Sanctuary. Until they ripped that away too.

 

The Captain moved nearer, shield raised to deflect the rain of gunshots. The last the Soldier had heard he was due back in the States after a disastrous trip to Lagos. Yet, here he was. Larger and louder than life. The Soldier, on the other hand, was rendered deaf and dumb. He felt like a bomb to be diffused. Ensnared in a web of hair-triggers. Pins and springs. Approach with caution. It would only take a sliver, a flinch, of time for him to explode. The man the Soldier had once called friend seemed determined to throw himself into his path nonetheless.

 

_Your Captain is dead._

How easily the news went in. Hit the chink in his raggedy armour, clean as a bullet. Left no mark, but stopped his heart just the same. A fatal real injury under the amnesia. A mouthful of blood.

Realisation dawned bright and terrible. An injection of cold white fire lit him up cell to cell. Ice burned to mist. He saw fireflies. Crackle of static. Bittersweet singe of flesh. A din of howls and moans rose around him.

_No one's coming for you._

It took him hours to recognise that the noises were his own. Pure animal. Feeble and destroyed. Past sobbing. Past begging.

 _G_ _od, Steve. I'm_ _so_ _sorry._

He saw an end. His end. The end. He longed for it. For release.

_Please. Make it all go away._

And that was exactly what they did.

 

Throwing himself directly into the line of fire, the Captain covered him with the full bulk of his serum-enhanced body. Suit and shield and all.

“Hold your fire!”

Gunfire ceased. Miraculously. Clearly, the shooters recognised the Captain's authority, but the Soldier doubted his word was law. The command of a war hero and an Avenger gave them pause, but it might not be enough. The Soldier was too great a hazard to let live.

 

The Soldier lurched from the cryostasis chamber -from the electric chair, from sleep, from death- into the tender mercies of his handlers.

The ice and the shocks and the drugs, they sapped his strength but did little to deaden his pain receptors. No matter. Endurance the Soldier had in spades. But of course, there were worse things than simple pain. Rumlow, for instance. Rumlow was worse.

Whatever they'd dosed him with dampened his senses, emptied his head, left him disorientated, but occasionally there would come fanged charged moments of clarity. In those moments, the Soldier longed for the heft of a blade to sink into flesh. To banish the cruel itch to close his mechanical fist around Pierce's neck, around Zola's, and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze-

 _Comply_.

Finally, he was given to Rumlow to break. He never worked quite right after that. Always needed correcting.

Too long, the Soldier had gone unmolested. Unaccounted for.

“Take him alive.”

_No. Not again. Never again._

Phantom hands clamped his limbs in their icy steely grip. A forest of hands. They yanked his hair. Scratched his skin. Pinched. Pawed. Prodded. He wanted them off. He wanted them gone. His pulse popped in his ears like permafrost on the melt. Sea ice groaning. Crackle of hail stones.

_Lie still._

The Soldier was distantly aware of the crush of bodies filling the apartment. No badges. No defining features. Just barked orders. As one, they came for him. The Soldier fought them. He couldn't help himself. Adamant elbow to the face. Kick square to the chest. Frantic. Automatic.

 

Glide and grind of gears. The new fist of Hydra.

_Wind him up and watch him go._

He flexed and sent the lab coats flying. Smashed skulls and crushed vertebrae. He didn't yet know his own strength.

_There's nothing more horrifying than a miracle._

 

“Please, Bucky.”

A word, a word from _him_ and all the Soldier's resolve melted all to slush. Inside, he was a weak squelchy mollusc thing. Shell prised open. Raw in his nakedness. Ruptured sore. Crater spanned by a grappling hook plea. The Captain begged. The Soldier listened. He stilled. His arms were wrenched behind him. He couldn't help but twist against the unwelcome torque of the magnetic cuffs as they snapped shut. A boot dug into the meat of his back. His cheek grated against the cracked grubby tile as he was forced to the ground. Powerless.

_Kneel. Comply._

God, he was so tired. Tired of killing to justify his existence. He half-hoped that SHIELD, or whoever they were, would put a bullet in his brain and be done with it. Alas, the jab of a needle to the neck. Scorching dart. Fizzing darkness stained the edges of his vision. He tried to hold on but he was slipping slipping slipping.

_J_ _ust let me go._

Rumlow always picked the softest places. Sensitive but inessential. They needed him operational. Not intact. Not in one piece. Vivid fractured recollections. Shards of stained glass. The foreign weight. The blunt-bodied intrusion of the act. Pestle and mortar. With time and friction, he ground the Soldier down.

_Beg for it, dog._

Toothless. Muzzled.

_Just a body. Just a body. Just a body._

Saved for special occasions. Rainy days. Storm cloud of bruises. Hooded eyes. Hidden damage. Injuries without trace. This body erased itself. Tool. Asset. Just a body. Not his. To be used and taken apart. By rough hands. Tongues in his ear. Demanding. Commanding.

_Comply. Comply._

He was just an empty vessel, after all.


	4. Benign (добросердечный)

The Soldier weaved in and out of consciousness. Dreaming awake. 6 hours jogged by. He approximated by his internal clock. No natural light. Not a speck of human contact since they'd deposited him in this bare-walled cell. No [more] shadows wrestled him to the floor. Interesting lack of restraints. Neutral. Sterile. Only the minute throb at his temples to mark the blood-drip passage of time. He stared dead ahead. Bored holes in the wall until the roof caved in. The Soldier folded in on himself. Time folded in on itself. The true prison was a cage of bone. His picked-clean skull. 

The Soldier paced back and forth across the confined space. One-way screen. Opaque reinforced glass. To escape he would need to employ excessive force. Blast his way out in splinters. Smithereens. The body count would be steep. Not a viable option. Not any more. Physically, he was fighting fit. Able to go days on end without rest or nourishment and still take on scores of skilled agents. Shark-like. He glided to and fro. Now that they finally had _the_ Winter Soldier -credited with over a two dozen assassinations in the last fifty years- in custody, it seemed that SHIELD weren't entirely sure what to do with him. There might be a trial at some point. The Soldier doubted they'd publicise it. Best just to get him out of the way. Maybe then they'd send him to their own electric chair. Wipe the slate clean for good. In the meantime, he'd been placed under observation.

At last, approaching footfall stilled him in his tracks. Coiled reflexes and steel. Primed to spring. The door unsealed with a hum like some space-age invention. The kind of thing cooked up by Howard Stark in the 40s. A woman entered. The Soldier knew her instantly: Natalia Alianovna Romanova. Black Widow. Slavic Shadow. A lance of memory. Spine-tingling. Her wine-coloured hair snapped like a flag in the lashing darkening wind of long ago. Fox fur steeped in vodka. Black ice. Bad penny. Heads or tails? KGB or Shield? Bolshoi or Red Room? The Soldier had sent her car over a cliff near Odessa. He'd shot his target straight through her body shield. And felt nothing. In DC, she'd come at him in the street with a garrotte and damaged his arm. He'd repaid her in kind. Another bullet. Another failure.

“Privyet, soldat,” the Widow greeted him. She was fluidly fluently impassive. Unparalleled in her field. Comfortable with everything. The Soldier wondered where she was hiding her tazers.

She appraised him just long enough to ascertain that there was no response forthcoming, before asking, "Can I call you James?"

The Soldier made no reply. Motionless. Emotionless. As she drew nearer, he tracked her every movement. Blank-faced and stony-eyed. As if to assert, _Y_ _ _ou have no idea what I've lost__ _._ To which she wordlessly replied, __Oh, but I do.__

He spoke, "You should have killed me when you had the chance."

The Widow didn't miss a beat, "Why is that?"

The Soldier caught his own baleful gaze in the glass panel behind her. His eyes were hard as pebbles. Cold as river stones. A wary mind-forged weariness saturated every pore of him. He waded neck deep in blood. Sodden right to the marrow.

He simply said, "I'm guilty."

Guilt was their true common language. There was profound intimacy in shared pain. Between them they had endured and inflicted so much. They were both compromised bodies. The difference was she wielded herself. The Soldier might be a shark, but he was also a prisoner. Passenger. Damned to endlessly tread the dark waters. To desist was to drown. He longed to be borne away. Reverse flow. Undertow. Engulfed by the rapid churn. The plughole sensation of blood loss and hypothermia. Eddying terminal spiral. Salt-white foam frothed red. Dashed to nothing. He longed to sink into the rusted-black mud and slip out of time. He should have died long ago. On the ice. On the slab. On the bridge. He should have let the Potomac swallow him.

Natalia switched to English. "How much do you remember?" Blunt but not unkind.

"Enough."

 _“_ Does the name Alexander Pierce mean anything to you?”

The Soldier sucked in a hasty breath.  _At ease, Sergeant._ _Exhale._

“He told me who to kill.”

_Your work has been a gift to mankind. You've shaped the century. And I need you to do it one last time..._

He took the shot. He took it, he took it, he took it. He killed and killed and killed. Ceaseless. Endless. Unremitting. Each regretful hit became a ghoul hungry for a pound of flesh. They flocked to feast on his aimless wanton guilt. Inadequate bluster. Facsimile of grief. The Soldier didn't have the mental energy or the wherewithal to pull up their names or faces. They were all the same to him. Just another mission. Each one was the first and the last. He ripped through the middle of the target. Soviet slug. Silencer.

_Missiya vpolneria._

The Soldier had maimed and mutilated. Willing or not. Mindful or not. He was culpable. He closed his eyes and saw red. Glossy grisly smears of body matter. Gaping drooling bullet holes fringed with vivid petals like black-eyed poppies. Ranks of monstrous blooms waving in memoriam. Bright scarlet smiles and nicked arteries. Red announced another victory. 

_How could that much ever be wiped out?_

“What about Steve Rogers?” The Widows cool tone slapped him back to the present.

“He was my last mission,” the Soldier supplied cagily. Rogers had been Bucky Barnes' first. His one and only. “I read about him in a museum.”

The Soldier's own mind was a palimpsest he could neither discern nor trust. Even though he kept his features shuttered and drawn. Veneer of indifference. Nevertheless the Widow could that he was holding back. There were things the Soldier still held back from himself. Only privately did he mourn his past life. His past self. He'd spent so long gripped in an insidious vise of detachment that he had barely even witnessed a number of the innumerable crimes committed against his own person. Numb to his own decay. Thawing was frost-bitten agony.

__Awake, awake._ _

The thought of Steve filled him with torturous electricity. So he held back. Insulated himself. He didn't want to be that man any more. He just wanted to disappear. It was time the Soldier was retired. Forcefully. With permanent and immediate effect.

__Termination protocol. Initiate shut down._ _

__Odin. Dva. Tri_ _ __-_ _

He fixed Agent Romanoff with a cold dead sniper stare. Shark eyes. Pebble eyes. Those deceptively small-clean-soft-safe hands of hers had put out eyes like his. Pulled countless triggers. Displaced bones. She could crunch his neck like a twig. He wanted her to be the one. A true Soviet stoic. He knew she had it in her. Quick and clean. One professional to another. Before the Captain, who was no doubt watching this exchange, could intervene.

“I'm a liability,” the Soldier stated blandly. 

A ripple of some emotion or other disturbed the Widow's immaculate composure, but she countered as smoothly as ever, “You're contained. The only person you're a danger to right now is yourself.” 

The Soldier let loose an ugly unhinged noise. Snarl or sob, it was hard to tell over the screech and shudder of train tracks racing through his head. He drove the heels of his hands into his eyelids until he saw daubs of bloody berry red. The hacked-up husk of a pomegranate clustered with glistening garnet seeds. Gored blood orange. Skinned red plums. Flesh fruits. Swollen scabs of the psyche. He scratched and they burst. Stung. Wept. Discharged their potent putrid lifeblood. Acid-sharp. Like fresh air eating away at open sores. What was canvas for but to take colour? What was skin for but to collect scars?

Distantly, he heard the Widow sigh. “What are we going to do with you?” It was clear she didn't expect an answer.

He had none to give. Except, “I don't know... what you want from me." 

_I don't know what I am._

"We could use people like you."

He wasn't a person. That much he knew. Granted, he had components of one. Arranged in a lesser configuration. Device. Grenade.

_Tick tock. Tick tock._

His line of sight sharpened. Refocused. Overlaid with red.

"Don't you mean monsters?"

The Widow smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. Glint of mica. Mineral brilliance. False sense of security. Chinked armour. Shattered sight. The Soldier overflowed with fractures. In this way, he and the Widow were one in the same.

_Odin. Dva. Tri._

_Tick tock._

Except, “I don't do that any more.”

He shuddered at the half-remembered scrabble of fingernails grasping at the final dregs of life. Ashen cheeks scored with rouge. Ghastly. He was slipping again.

“You can save me, Natalia,” the Soldier entreated. Equal parts defiance and despair. By which, of course, he meant __Put me down__ _._ _ _End me. End this.__ The blunt monotone from before replaced with knife-edged desperation.

The Widow effortlessly deflected the jab. She rose to leave. Only once she'd reached the door did she pause to toss a brusque reply over her shoulder: "Save yourself."


	5. Nine (Девять)

What was there left to save?

The Soldier he saw reflected back at him in the glass seemed surprised to note that his cheeks were tracked with tears. The Soldier hadn't known he was still capable of them. They leaked from him like blood from a stone. Unprecedented in recent -partially recovered- memory. The stones set in his skull were melting, melting, melting. Oil spills. Cobwebs. Silvery razor trails. Bitter, bitter, bitter.

“He's all yours,” the Soldier heard the Widow say before someone -the someone- stepped into his red-trickled field of vision. Bloodshot kaleidoscope. He tried in vain to blink away the beads. Even though he’d braced himself for impact, the sight of the Captain made his bleeding melting eyes sorer than ever. In the enclosed artificial space there was nowhere else to look. The Soldier hunkered down as compactly as his muscular bulk would allow. He drew his knees to his chest. A child's pretend fortress to ward off imaginary foes. Raised drawbridge. Portcullis.

The Captain stepped closer and sank down beside him. He went so far as to clasp the Soldier’s shoulder. A jolt. No one had laid a hand on him since DC. Not without swift brutal repercussion. In the shapeless fog of his own experiences, where there was touch, pain, without fail, came next. While a combination of the serum and botched neural pathways meant the Soldier’s threshold was abnormally high, lately his body echoed the natural response(s) to trauma. In the chair, before Hydra had gotten to work Barnes had cycled through them all. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn. Suffering lodged in the mind. In the fear. The shock, the blow, the knife that never landed.

_Remember when-? Remember when-?_

The instinct to forcibly dislodge the gentle pressure of outstretched fingers was intense, but the Soldier didn’t flinch. This time, he tolerated the contact. The Captain already had hold of him. Had part of him. The Soldier could not remember the last time they'd embraced. Like this. At all. For the briefest of moments, he remained stock still. Unsure whether to resist or melt against the touch. The sheer body heat the Captain emitted was warmth enough to dry up the tears. At such close quarters it was disarming.

_At ease. Easy, there. Easy._

The Soldier gave way.

The Captain spoke as if to a spooked animal, “They wouldn't let me see you, but I'm here now...”

Clearly the man still foolishly believed that his friend inhabited the body before him. The Soldier ached to yell _I'm here, Steve. I'm right here. I never left_. But he was loathe to offer false hope. He remained silent. Kept his emotions shuttered and drawn. In truth, the man the Captain once knew was falling. Long-lost. Elsewhere. Scrambling across No Man's Land.

_You've known me your whole life._

Phantom stabs carved the Soldier all to ribbons. He felt shredded at the seams. Bristling with stitches like Frankenstein's monster. Like he might come apart if he let go.

_Believe it. Believe me._

His body responded of its own volition. Strange liquid stirring. Hot all over. How bizarre it was to feel warmth again. The Captain's heartbeat was thunderous. A hammer on cloth. Perishable. Finite. Unguarded. The Soldier could pry open his ribcage like a bear trap. A treasure chest. Pluck his heart clean out. And Steve would let him. A weakness the Soldier could not abide. He had no right to this man's heart. The man to whom his own past belonged. The one who'd gotten in under the wire. As no other human being -no single one of the Soldier's myriad victims- ever had.

His to protect.

_Your Captain is dead._

Only here he was larger than life.

The Soldier felt his lungs seize. It was too much. It was all too much.

The Captain pulled back. “Buck?” His eyes -that ridiculous blue- welled with concern. Palpable. Wrenching. So earnest that for a split-second the Soldier failed to breathe. In one rough move he extricated himself and stood. The Captain pivoted to follow. Never letting the Soldier out of his sight.

Finally the Soldier retrieved his voice. “I'm not him.”

_Your pal, your buddy, your Bucky._

The Captain shook his head vehemently. “You saved my life. You pulled me out of the water-

“I hurt you. I shot you,” the Soldier countered in a brittle raspy monotone that cracked out of him like shrapnel. The real Bucky Barnes would never hurt Steve Rogers. Never even dream of it. He'd die first. He did die first.

“Hydra didn’t give you a choice,” the Captain said. Stupid, stubborn Steve. _Oh, y_ _ou idiot. You dumb punk._

The Soldier kept going, “The worst thing is, I would've stuck a knife in you too and not spared it a second thought. I can barely remember all the people I killed. I wouldn’t have even known it was you.”

_Lie still, Sergeant Barnes. This won't hurt a bit._

“None of it was your fault,” the Captain forged on in gentle desperation. Then, “I forgive you. I will always forgive you, don't you see?” Impassioned. Beseeching.

 _Give me the pain. Let me take it from you_.

The Soldier recoiled as if burned. Derelict catacombs of memory threw up clouds of dust in his face. Sweeping fog. Mustard gas. It tickled the Soldier's throat. To sift through the rubble was treacherous.

__For once in your life just give up on me. Think of yourself._ _

He knew it was killing the Captain by increments just to stand there. How many times had Bucky wished he could shoulder Steve's grievances? Wanted to spread the weight of the suffering evenly between them so as to not fall through the ice? Unfortunately, the Soldier’s entire person was a hurt even Captain America was helpless to fight or soothe.

_I don't deserve your redemption ._

The Soldier knew he would try and fix him anyway. Only to destroy himself in the process. The Soldier's fingers twitched at the thought. He had to put a stop to this. On impulse, he retorted “I am what Hydra made me. Nothing more.” The words bubbled up from a cold vicious place inside. They clogged his throat. Noxious. Ruinous. Malignant thing.

“Bucky-” That name again. Always that name. Bucky, Bucky, Bucky. Equal parts defiance and despair. Order and plea.

Where the Captain's tone was uncomfortably heated the Soldier's was icy. “Bucky died in 1943.”

 _H_ _e bled out like an animal in the snow. Waiting for you. He thought of you to the last. He screamed your name. Held onto it longer than his own._

Winded, the Soldier sucked in a breath. He didn't want to be that man any more. He just wanted to disappear. He glanced at the Captain. It was like reliving a frame of their clash on the helicarrier. His verbal bullet punched through the Captain’s suit. Tore into dense yielding muscle. Arterial bloom. Loaded silence. This time Steve didn't clutch at his side or fall to his knees. The only visible breaks in his composure were the slightest jaw clench. The minute spasm of the Adam's apple. The glint of tears threatening to burst their banks.

Such was the power James Buchanan Barnes had over this man who walked like a god. The little guy who never backed down from a fight. Never let sorrows harden his heart. Older and sadder, now, but the Soldier could see why Bucky, who'd never trusted the world, had put his trust in Rogers, but the Soldier couldn't eke out an existence by feeding off of his persistent, maddening hope. The Captain struggled for a beat. His eyes were palest flame. Water set alight. The Soldier saw himself reflected there. A ripple. An imperfection. He had to look away.

That was when he felt the softest of touches. Rough-worn pads of fingertips. Callused palm. Web of fault lines. An offering. The Captain’s thumb rubbed smooth concentric rings over the tender inside of the Soldier’s wrist. The Soldier didn’t shrug him off. Finally, he lifted his eyes. And scowled.

“Stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m some sort of miracle.”

The Captain huffed an exasperated gasp. “I lost you, Bucky. Twice, now. The first time you fell I got so low… I didn't have to go down with that plane, I _wanted_ to.”

The Captain still hadn't relinquished his hand. Death was their only exit and the Captain steadfastly barred the way. The Soldier relished the thought of his own passing but to mourn the Captain…Even reduced to a splice of ghost and machine, for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, there was one single reality which Bucky Barnes could not bear and that was a world without Steve Rodgers. An abhorrent thought. His stomach dropped like a body flung from a speeding train.

__Let go of me. Let me go._ _

The Soldier released the grip on the Captain’s fingers and let his hand drop to his side like a dead thing. Unsalvageable. He didn’t want to watch the Captain’s face crumple but he grudgingly bore his gaze as he whispered pitifully, “I was never worth that, Steve. Even when I was whole.”

He’d slipped up. The name had escaped unbidden. God, he'd missed the curl of it on his tongue. God, how the sound of it made him cringe.

“No,” the Captain said. With great care and great conviction. “I don't believe that. I never will.”

“I’m not the same. I don’t think I’ll ever be. I had to read about you in a museum, Steve...” -the Soldier couldn’t resist indulging in the name a second time- “and even then it took me so long...”

The Captain cleared his throat. “Why disappear? Why didn’t you come to me?”

“I didn’t want to-” he trailed off. Drag you down? Be a burden? Ruin everything?

The Captain barely missed a beat before, “I would’ve dropped it all in a second, you know that.”

The Soldier didn’t doubt it. That was the problem. The Soldier was broken beyond repair, but he was loathe to hurt anyone else. Least of all, the Captain. It took all of his strength to mutter, “I’m a coward, then.”

At this, the Captain drew himself up to his full height. All the light and air in the cell gathered and bunched around him. He occupied the space as though about to make a speech to the room itself, or perhaps the agents that, the Soldier remembered, laxly, were huddled on the other side of the glass and behind however many miniscule cameras were stashed about the place, recording furiously, but the Captain’s attention was all for him. The Soldier had to quash the urge to squint up at him and shift from foot to foot like any old boy-soldier.

“You’re the furthest thing.”

The Soldier had no words left. They scattered like dead leaves. The Captain made no move to grab ahold of the Soldier this time or even to skirt the border of closeness. There was no need. It felt as if he had. As if they stood toe to toe, chest to chest. Each breath passed directly from the Captain’s lips to the Soldier’s own. A precarious life cord he clung to involuntarily. Resistance seemed futile now. The necessary eternal damned truth was that in more ways than one the Captain was the only reason the Soldier lived to see another day.

**Author's Note:**

> This story has been knocking around on my laptop forever and I finally thought what the heck. So here it is.  
> I apologise for the shoddy self-editing.


End file.
